


Acherontia atropos

by starcunning



Series: Erebidae [7]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Consensual Snuff, F/M, Igeyorhm is mentioned, Pashtarot is mentioned, Psychic Bond, Soul Bond, technically kallie's not the MAIN wol but u kno, the main wol DOES actually show up in this one!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2020-08-23 06:47:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20238493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starcunning/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: His thumb skimmed over her throat, stoking her pulse even as he pressed his fingertip to it.“Tupsimati,” she echoed, remembering at last. “What would you do with it?”“Solve the troublesome problem of your mortality, for one,” he said.





	Acherontia atropos

**Author's Note:**

> Further [imports from tumblr.](https://starcunning.tumblr.com/post/181722986884/acherontia-atropos)
> 
> _Acherontia atropos_ is more widely known as the death's-head moth, and is perhaps the most recognizable member of the Erebidae.

Nabriales neither ate nor slept. As the days passed, this became obvious; he shared none of Kallisti’s concern for these needs. She could spear fowl from the air with lances of ice or call a levinbolt to stun the fish and frogs in a pond, cooking them over a fire of her own making, but for all that he sat by her hearth he never partook.

He _could_ eat, and perhaps could remember how to sleep, he admitted; he simply had no need to do either. Sometimes he would touch her, the darkness of his aether spilling into her, as though into her very veins. And he would let her rest her head against his chest, leaning on the confines of his mortal frame—but when she looked upon him with anything other than her sight, she knew she was well past the bounds of his being. Slowly, the weakness of blood loss ebbed.

Through it all, her linkpearl remained silent.

“We should return to Mor Dhona,” Nabriales said one morning. It was crisp and cold—the sea tempered the teeth of winter somewhat, but Kallisti could see her own breath on the air when she answered him.  
“We?”  
“Yes, _we._”  
“I have no idea what the situation is there,” Kallisti said, “and they haven’t called for me. What I’m more interested in is why _you_ want to go.”  
“Your mortal fragility troubles me,” Nabriales said. “It was a nearer thing than I thought. And I yet require the Key.”  
“What? What key?”  
Nabriales looked at her, running a gloved hand through his hair, sweeping it back from his brow. “Do you recall the circumstances of our meeting?”  
“Minfilia? She’s the key?” Kallisti asked, feeling a flare of some hot emotion in the back of her mind.  
The Ascian only laughed at that, claws brushing her cheek, his aether stirring her own with that simple, possessive gesture. “Don’t be jealous, little fool,” he said. “Especially over a misunderstanding. Your Antecedent is of no interest to me. It was the staff I came for.” His thumb skimmed over her throat, stoking her pulse even as he pressed his fingertip to it.  
“Tupsimati,” she echoed, remembering at last. “What would you do with it?”  
“Solve the troublesome problem of your mortality, for one,” he said.

She looked at him, trying not to shiver from the cold, her breath a plume of white on the air, every puff of steam precious heat escaping her. Soon she would build a fire; she had not entirely forgotten the ways of her clan even after years of “civilizing” influence.  
“I didn’t realize that was a problem to be solved,” Kallisti said.  
“In most cases it is not,” Nabriales admitted.  
When he said no more, she reached for him, spilling her light into his darkness like a piercing ray. Perhaps this was not Hydaelyn’s purpose in granting her the Echo; Minfilia and Lensha had lamented often enough how little control they had over it—and even now she could not completely master it. Or else she should never have awoken to find herself at Laurentius Daye’s mercy. Nor could she compel a vision from Nabriales now—but there were other paths to understanding. She pressed against the boundary between them, and felt his surprise as her own.

It was the first time she had managed it without his prompting and guidance. The pride that swelled in her chest belonged to both of them. Nabriales still pressed a hand to her cheek, insofar as the distinction between them mattered; it was as true to call it her hand and his cheek, in moments like this.

He was afraid—_they _were afraid, and at the heart of that shared fear was the realization that Kallisti was the only thing Nabriales had been allowed to claim for himself since his ascension. She felt the fragility of her flesh-bound existence, the weight of mortality that seemed poised to snap the aetherial tether between the pair of them. She probed deeper, reaching into the core of him, that kernel of black crystal that maintained his sense of self even when they commingled.

He did not experience the world as she did. That much had long become obvious, the distinction made still more stark in that first communion in Sharlayan. Nabriales drew no distinction between aether and form; their shared sensation was unbounded by flesh. It was dulled by the layers they both cloaked themselves in; without that simple armor the ebb and flow of energy in the world might prove a distraction. She moved; he moved. As he had said. But he moved and he moved the world, all of reality bent to his superior perception.

They felt seconds as a lifetime; they felt eras as days.

She was such a small thing; a speck of light in a storm of darkness. Her life was like the flickering of a firefly. How could it matter? And yet it did. This had ceased to be a casual dalliance the moment he had joined his aether to hers—an impulsive decision made when Elidibus threatened his dominion, its consequences compounded ever since. From then ‘til now, her light seeping in through the cracks. Even when she withdrew, some part of her remained; some mote of light in a heart of darkness.

Nabriales was panting when she looked upon him again. It was such a curiously mortal reaction, she could not help but smile at it. She leaned in, kissing his slack mouth, awakening him from his daze.  
“I see,” she said. “Will it take long?”  
“No,” Nabriales told her. “Once we have the staff, I await only your readiness.”  
“Why do you need it?” she asked.  
“You don’t know what it does, do you?” he said, brow knitting in consternation.  
“No.”  
“That staff allows its bearer to gather vast quantities of aether from the surrounding environs and bring it to bear.”  
“And that will … make me immortal, somehow?”  
Nabriales scoffed, seeming annoyed. “You are already immortal. It is the flesh in which you reside that makes you fragile. You must renounce it.”  
“I have to die, you mean,” Kallisti said.  
“Does a tree die when it drops its leaves in winter?” he asked. “I wish only to unmoor you from the bonds of your mortality.”  
She considered that a moment, and found no reason to doubt him. Not when she had felt in her own breast his feelings for her.

It seemed foolish in retrospect to have ever questioned them in the first place, she had to own. “Alright,” she said.  
“The scholar gave you a prism of white auracite,” he said. “I will need it. And I will need your athame,” he said.  
“If it’s aether you need, there is a confluence in the old ruins,” Kallisti said. “Mhachi ritualists would use it. I remember …” She lifted a hand to her chest, stroking the smooth surface of her violet crystal. “You’ve done this before?”  
“It was done to me,” Nabriales said, “in eras long past. I am familiar with its workings. Are you prepared to return to Mor Dhona?”  
“No need,” Kallisti said, retrieving her pack. At her feet she cast the sword, the stone, the staff. He bent to collect them with reverence.  
“You had it all along?” he mused.  
“Yes,” Kallisti said.  
“Then you were always the answer, little fool,” he said, tipping her chin up with his fingertips.

* * *

The sky was a featureless plain of light; its blanket of clouds diffused the sun to undifferentiated silver. The stone against her back was cold. Kallisti could feel the runes carved into the ancient plinth against her bare skin, subtlest voids in the chilly sensation. Her Crystal of Light—called forth in preparation—rested against her chest, its crimson glow the brightest color in the bleached ruin.

Nabriales put one hand against her cheek. In the other, he held the rectangular prism of white stone. “It’s time,” he said.  
Kallisti said nothing; there was no need of speech between them now. She lifted her hand to curl her fingers around the cool white stone, and let it leech the heat from her palm. The auracite was a thirsty stone, greedy for her aether in the same way her mage’s staff readily called it forth. But its intent was not to focus her will; no, instead it leeched her aether from her and held it.

The already-dim world grew more distant. The stone’s cold seemed less pressing; the feeling of Nabriales’s clawed gauntlet against her face no longer filled her with smothering warmth. She felt exhausted, as she did after a taxing battle or a number of long-range teleports. It was a familiar sensation; a life in service to the Scions of the Seventh Dawn was neither easy nor comfortable. Kallisti tried to call the sustaining, infusing power of ice, but she could not focus long enough to form the spell. Her hand fell from the stone. Nabriales’s naked face swam in her vision. She reached for him; her grasp fell short. her fingers burned against the black crystal at his throat.

Then she saw no more. The pain wracked her, squeezed her eyes shut. She had so little left to give, and he wrung it from her anyway. She would have called it cruelty, had she the faculty for speech. But she had been robbed of it long since; she was a kernel of self awash in a sea of agony. How easily a candle in the darkness could be snuffed.

Somewhere, far away from here, a knife slipped through her ribs. The last burst of aether from the ritual dagger allowed her sensation enough to feel the blood well and pour, the searing pain of her pierced heart. Hydaelyn’s little fool breathed her last.

Her agony was not ended then; the breath of her soul was the first captured by the staff and channeled back into the crystal. Kallisti felt herself stretched across insurmountable distance, but the aether caused her Crystal of Light to flare still brighter, power welling in its hallowed lattices. She had felt every bit of her being torn apart; she felt every bit of her being put back together, drawn from the auracite prison by the staff and poured back into the Crystal. She was flame and light; she could feel the world dying around her. Mosses and mushrooms that had seen the turning of a thousand years gave up their energy unto her; the chill upon the air and the levinbolts that crackled unborn in the clouds above joined the maelstrom of energies at her heart. Even the Ascian gave up some part of himself, as he had long since done.

In marking his supremacy he had given himself to her.

She did not need to breathe, but gasped all the same. Still the power flowed into her, rising like a spring to the surface, threatening to spill over in a thousand rivers. The Source, she recalled at once. Like its endless waters she flowed back into her body.

Kallisti could exist without it, but the vessel was useful. At the very least, it shielded her from the raw currents of aether that still flowed over her. The auracite was tapped, the staff pumping an empty well; all the energy it could collect had been given unto her.

“Nabriales,” she said, and felt the way his name rippled through the air. He oriented himself toward her—not merely looking with the blinded eyes of his vessel; she could see that now, could truly see him now. Every mote of umbral aether that comprised him reached for her, darkness rising up to meet her light.

Was this what he had felt all along? She no longer concerned herself with cold stone or gelid wind; she cared only for the way the aether flowed. They had deadened this place to make her live, but already the currents were bringing life and energy back to the ruins. She reached out and pressed her hand to his bare face, and watched the way he reacted. Had he been mortal, that simple touch would have made him gasp. But that was a mortal reaction, and so she saw instead the way that his aetherial form bristled, her overwhelming power finding ground in him.

It made her laugh. She stripped him with nothing but a thought, unmaking the simulacrum of his robes so that she could press her skin to his. It felt no longer like a boundary, a membrane between them; it was as ephemeral as a shaft of light or a cast shadow. She could reach into him without effort now, could commingle readily with him.

They were one. Not in the same way they had been one when she had been mortal, where his sensations, his thoughts, his history were hers to explore; they became at last a single entity of radiant light and deepest darkness. An estuary was neither the sea nor the river; it was both, and so were they, until she withdrew.

He was in awe. She did not need to see his expression to know that.  
“I am of the Source,” she said.  
He laughed. “I have not forgotten,” he said. He leaned in as though to kiss her, in much the same needy fashion she had lifted her mouth to his once. She felt the kiss as mortal sensation and as a much more immediate touch, and then she felt the rising tide of aether that presaged teleportation.

Elidibus was winter’s darkness, cold to her even at a distance.  
“What is this?” he said. “You cannot truly have believed this would escape my notice.”  
“No,” Kallisti told him, drawing her light about her like armor, making of it a shroud against his influence. “But it is too late for you to intervene now.”  
“What an amusing pet you’ve chosen, Nabriales,” the Emissary said. “Bring her to the palace. Now.”

* * *

She could feel the darkness at the heart of the moon—Zodiark slumbered beneath her feet, Nabriales had told her. There was no air to convey the words, but they made themselves understood to one another just the same. It was cold, she noted, in much the same way she noted that the walls around them were tinged with violet. Both facts had become remote to her.

Elidibus seethed, though Kallisti could not yet guess at the cause of that. It could not be that he was angry at being robbed of her, for he was soon joined by his own flickering light. His face was none she knew.

But there were aetherial signatures that were familiar to her—Lahabrea she knew at least a little, and there was another Ascian who seemed familiar somehow, though when she cast herself out to reach him he swiftly rebuffed her.  
“Who is that?” she asked.  
“That,” Nabriales said, “is Pashtarot. Why.”  
“I think we’ve met,” Kallisti said.  
“Unlikely,” he advised her.

Her concentration was stolen a moment later by a disturbance upon the empty platform to their left. Kallisti could not help but turn her head and watch the shadows coalesce into the last robed figure to arrive—a woman, she realized, with blue hair and a bifurcated mask. She stared a few seconds longer, forcing herself to see past aether that whirled like snowflakes in a winter squall and down to the mere physicality of her. Even so, it was nobody she recognized.

Not so the second figure that appeared a moment later, the third light to flare into existence in this benighted realm. She knew her by face and aether both, for such overwhelming brightness could belong to only one other person.

Lensha Hathaar noticed her staring, and scowled back.


End file.
